What Happens When a Trading Competition Ends

The end of a competition is the part traders think about least and care about most. Here is what actually happens between the clock hitting zero and money moving — including the parts that are genuinely uncertain.

The clock stops, then the status flips

A competition has an absolute end time. Once it passes, the campaign moves from active to ended.

That flip is not instantaneous to the millisecond. Status is reconciled as the platform runs, so there is a short window where the clock has passed but the page has not caught up. Nothing is scored in that window — the end time is the end time, and volume traded after it does not count regardless of what the status badge says.

The leaderboard syncs that read the venue stop contributing new volume past the end. Final standings are whatever the last sync covering the competition window produced.

The last raffle draw still runs

Competitions with a daily or weekly raffle have one draw per completed period, and the final period usually completes at or near the competition's end.

The draw job runs on a schedule rather than continuously, so by the time it fires the campaign may already be marked ended. Recently ended competitions are deliberately kept in scope for a short settlement window so the last draw is never silently skipped. Draw generation is also clamped to the competition's actual duration — no draw is created for time after the end — and the job is idempotent, so a period can only ever produce one draw.

For entry-fee challenges the ordering is stricter: a settled challenge is closed to draws entirely, because settlement has already committed the pool. Any final draws run inside settlement itself, before the split.

Eligibility filters apply

This is where a leaderboard position and a payout diverge. Being on the board is not the same as qualifying, and the filters run before any money is divided.

For a volume or PnL competition, a row is excluded if any of these is true:

• Zero volume. Registered but never traded.
• Below the minimum volume to qualify. Measured in counted volume — the capped figure, not raw turnover.
• Below the eligibility points threshold, where the competition sets one.
• No connected social account, where the competition requires one.
• Below the minimum trade count, where the competition sets one.

Everyone who survives those filters is the qualifying field. Everyone who does not is excluded entirely — their volume does not dilute the pool, and their projected reward was already showing a dash before the end.

A few requirements cannot be checked from leaderboard data alone — minimum trade size, minimum deposit, minimum hold duration. Where a competition sets those, projections stay at zero throughout rather than showing a number that settlement might not honour. That is a deliberate refusal to guess, not a bug.

Entry-fee PnL challenges add their own filters at settlement: the entry must be paid, not refunded, past the flat-start gate, and above the challenge's minimum volume. Lines that never went flat after the start never began accruing and are excluded.

The pool splits

First the pool is reduced to what the leaderboard actually divides: the advertised pool minus the raffle reserve, where the reserve is the prize per draw multiplied by the number of draws the competition ran.

Then the mode decides the split:

Pro rata. Each qualifying trader receives the main pool multiplied by their share of the qualifying field's total counted points.

Leaderboard tiers. Fixed percentages go to fixed finishing positions. Where traders share a rank, the percentages covering the positions that block occupies are pooled and split equally between them.

Percentage-of-field buckets (challenges only). Bucket sizes resolve against the final eligible count, and the share inside each bucket decays down the ranks rather than splitting flat.

The arithmetic is the same arithmetic the projection column was running live, against the same eligible field — which is the point. A projection that used a different field from settlement would be a page promising numbers settlement would not pay. How projected rewards are calculated and leaderboard tiers versus pro rata cover both modes in depth.

For challenges, settlement ranks the eligible paid entries by their frozen PnL score, writes the reward rows, and is idempotent — prior auto-generated rows are cleared and rewritten rather than duplicated if it runs twice.

Payout rails

How the money actually reaches you depends on the rail the competition was configured with. Three exist, and they behave differently:

The rail is worth checking before you enter, not after. It determines whether you need to take an action to receive anything, and how quickly a token reward becomes something you can actually sell. Reward rails compared goes through the trade-offs.

Where a competition publishes proof of the prize pool or proof of payout, those links appear on the competition page. That is the accountability mechanism: a sponsor who funded the pool up front and published the transaction is making a checkable claim.

The honest part about timing

Rewards are computed from the final standings shortly after a competition ends. When they arrive in your wallet is a different question, and it is not one anyone should answer with a fixed number.

Settlement figures depend on the last venue sync being complete and correct. Where a competition is scoped to specific markets, or where a venue's data needed replaying, verification takes as long as it takes. Manual rails involve a human sending funds. On-chain rails involve a distribution being published before anything is claimable. Partner-direct rails involve a third party on their own schedule.

Any platform that promises a specific payout date for every competition is either running only one rail or not telling you the truth. The competition page is the place to watch, and the standings you can see are the standings the payout is computed from.

What you can do

Three things are within your control at the end of a competition.

Check your eligibility before the clock runs out, not after. If you are sitting below the qualifying minimum with a day remaining, that is a solvable problem. After the end it is not.

Read your final counted volume, not your raw volume. The number that decided your reward is the capped one. Counted volume versus raw volume explains the gap.

Check whether your rail requires a claim. A Merkl-distributed reward sitting unclaimed is still yours, but it does not arrive on its own.

Browse live competitions, or see how to read a competition page so the ending holds no surprises.